Reading Monuments – Building Memories

As a storage for knowledge and memories books and archives represent the human desire to preserve the past. In her talk Moran Pearl examines monuments that use books and libraries as symbols to commemorate the Second World War and the Holocaust. Interestingly, images of books and archives are blooming right now in the so called technological age, when media innovations render the old printed book outdated. Focusing on three concrete monuments – “The Empty Library” by Micha Ullman in Berlin, the “Nameless Library” by Rachel Whiteread in Vienna and “The Hall of Names” by Moshe Safdie in the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem – Moran Pearl shows how the book as a symbol is used in different contexts of commemoration depending on the monument’s placement and aesthetics, local memory culture and artistic relations as well as the dialogue it creates.

Moran Pearl is MA student in the Austrian Studies Program at Hebrew University (Jerusalem); currently she is IWM Junior Visiting Fellow.